What good news in the world

can move the mountain in the throat 
of a human being calling out their own 
mother’s name on the verge of a moment 
no English word capably denotes

Copyright © 2024 by Paolo Javier. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on June 24, 2024, by the Academy of American Poets. 

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“‘What good news in the world’ is part of a new sequence of poems called Near Your Mirror Home (Return to Nicholson Road) whose language and gestures are more, dare I say, legible, certainly compared with the paratactic poetry that I am usually inspired and inclined to make. In this new sequence, I draw exclusively from my dream journal practice, experimenting with oneiric processes set with and against a more familiar short (near) lyric narrative form and mode. For the most part, adhering to syntax, ‘What good news in the world’ and the rest of its cycle and sequence can nevertheless still be read modularly, with room for the reader to enjoy and endure the slippage that remains so basic and fundamental to our experience of dreaming.”
—Paolo Javier